Saturday, January 30, 2010

A Long Silence

When Pope Benedict urged Roman Catholic priests to blog, there was some discussion of whether or not he should blog. One commentator that I heard said that if he did, he would have to accept the discipline of blogging every day.

So, I have failed as a blogger, having let a month go by without posting. There are, of course, reasons for that, chiefly the fact that I have been sick since I last posted. Not seriously, I am at death's door,sick, but sick enough with bronchitis and a hematoma that I managed to create by coughing to have slowed me down considerably.

Besides that, I have been preoccupied with thoughts about retiring. Not so much musings on where we will live, what part-time work I can do, and what it will be like to live near our granddaughter, but thoughts about leave-taking from a parish that I have served for the past eight years. An Alban Institute publication, which I have not yet consulted, likened it to running through thistles. Responsible leave-taking is hard work and I don't imagine that I will get it right. I will make mistakes and will leave some messes for others to clean up after I'm gone. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't work at getting it as right as possible.

We set the date and then, for a number of reasons, decided to make that date, at least for the present, a tentative one. We now have a retirement window - June and July - and will find in the next month the date that seems to work best for all of us.

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Daniel Weir

The Thin Tradition

The opinions expressed in this Blog - which was originally called The Gospel in ToyTown - are solely those of the author. You are free to reproduce or link to another site anything that I post here. Please let me know if you do that and please acknowledge this blog as the source of reproduced material.

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About Me

After nearly 22 years in Western New York, I retired on June 30, 2010 and moved "back home" to Massachusetts, to Danvers. Six years later we moved to the Mount Washington Valley, where we met in 1971 and got married in 1972. Six For the eight and a half years prior to retiring, I served as the Rector of Saint Matthias Church, the Episcopal Parish in East Aurora in the Diocese of Western New York. Since my ordination in 1972, I have served as the Assistant Chaplain at Balliol College, Oxford; as a parish priest in Western Massachusetts and Western New York; as a member of the diocesan staff in Western New York; as the Director of the Erie County Commission on Homelessness (now the Homeless Alliance of Western New York); and as a religion teacher at Cardinal O'Hara High School.